Ben
Brantley

September 17, 2015

Enter flouncing, the ladies of the chorus. They are wearing flower-festooned headgear that Carmen Miranda might have thought appropriate for an Easter parade, with festive smiles to match. Granting that a few of these women are men in skirts, they otherwise would have fit right into a Broadway musical frolic of the 1930s, harmonizing and hoofing cheerfully behind a star like Ethel Merman. Of course it’s unlikely that any of Ms. Merman’s supporting cast members would have sung to her about how doomed, flawed and unhappy she was. Had they tried it, you can imagine that forceful star bellowing, “Ix-nay on the gloom, kids!” But for folks like Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Achilles, a pessimistic, philosophizing chorus is one of those heavy burdens that ill-fated ancient Greeks, or at least the thespians who play them, have to live with. And this chorus is sure more fun to have around than the usual monotonously chanting sackcloth-and-ashes gang. A spectacularly made-over Greek chorus is the chief asset of this generally less confident version of Euripides’ “Iphigenia in Aulis,” which opened on Thursday night as part of the Classic Stage Company’s Greek Festival. This production comes from two of contemporary theater’s most winningly iconoclastic talents: the playwright Anne Washburn (“Mr. Burns”), who “transadapted” Euripides’ text, and the director Rachel Chavkin (Dave Malloy’s “Preludes” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812”).